May 20, 2011

Sometimes names, sayings, and slogans do not port well to non-English speaking countries. When Kentucky Fried Chicken opened their first restaurant in Beijing, they accidentally translated KFC's famous slogan, “Finger-lickin' good” to “We'll Eat Your Fingers Off!
Pepsi had fun when "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" turned out to be "Pepsi will make your ancestors return from the dead". in Taiwan.
Pizza Hut calzone called the P'zone turned into pezón, the Spanish word for "nipple".
Puffs tissues had a problem in Germany as the name is a colloquial term for whorehouse.
A warehouse sign in China was painted on the building as "Translator Server Error".
Coors slogan, “Turn it loose!” came out as, “Suffer from Diarrhea" in Spanish.
Clairol had a curling iron called the "Mist Stick" that turned out to be “Manure Stick” in Germany.
Jersey Shore cast comes out as "The New Jersey Life of Macaroni Rascals".
Frank Perdue of chicken fame was surprised when, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken" was translated into, "It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused".
The name for a massage parlor in Japan was translated into hand job.
An interesting twist was IKEA furniture in Swedish translated into English became a "Fartfull workbench". Finally after a Papal visit, “I saw the Pope” (el Papa) translated as “I saw the potato” (la papa).

Nov 12, 2009

On the Fortune 500 list of top industries, health insurance companies ranked 35th in profitability in 2008; their overall profit margin was 2.2 percent. They lagged far behind such industries as pharmaceuticals, profit margin 19.3 percent, railroads (12.6 percent), and mining (11.5 percent). Among health insurers, the best performer last year was HealthSpring, which showed a profit of 5.4 percent. “That’s a less profitable margin,’’ AP noted, “than was achieved by the makers of Tupperware, Clorox bleach, and Molson and Coors beers.’’

For the most recent quarter of 2009, health-insurance plans earned profits of only 3.3 percent, ranking them 86th on the expanded Yahoo! Finance list of US industries. Makers of software applications, by contrast, are pulling in profits of nearly 22 percent.